A loot box may have nothing.

A quick search on Google and Gemini responded that you're wrong on this with Valve games. They always have give an item to the buyer.

I bought a ton of collectible cards when I was in middle school. I lost track of the number of times the value of the cards was worth even as much as the price paid for the pack.

Loot boxes are the same dynamic as long as they give something of intrinsic value in the game.

By the logic used by both the AG and this firm, every collectible card system is also gambling.

That includes baseball cards that my '46 Boomer dad grew up collecting.

Valve should mock the crap out of this buy just buying a collection of MTG, Pokemon, baseball cards, Marvel trading cards and random blind bags from 5 and Below, toss them at the jury and say "is this gambling too?"

Sony and Nintendo both had to increase the costs of their consoles once already, and Nintendo is warning that the Switch 2 might have to go up again because the memory situation is getting that bad.

On a grand scale, my gut says that China is doing to us with AI what we did with military spending to the USSR. The way these companies are inefficiently using capital is insane, but what's even crazier is how no one in the financial sector or government is willing to say "you're drunk, go home."

The one saving grace in all of this is that Tesla is dog-fooding their own AI chips, and Musk has hinted that they might declare war on Nvidia in the nearish future. Allegedly, their chips are faster and more energy efficient than Nvidia's because they're specifically designed for AI workloads, particularly in embedded systems like cars and satellites (SpaceX is a fast growing private customer of Tesla here). That could end up shaking up a lot of things if it works out.

It's only $175B.

We were going to spend that much on debt over the next ~3 weeks anyway.

That's the USA in 2026 for you.

A few major things Sony has going for them:

1. Large install base (~92M according to Gemini).
2. More powerful than the Switch 2.
3. Way more relevant than XBox.
4. Microsoft is starting to have no choice but to target PS5; Gears of War Reloaded and Halo Combat Evolved Remaster are two major examples.
5. Nintendo is struggling really hard to not push the Switch 2 to $475-$500 which is a really bad price point for them.

Seriously, Sony would have to be just stupid to push a PS6 any time soon when they could just double down on content for the PS5.

Their wording specifically sounds like they're not working on tools where you can "prompt your way into a movie," but rather tools that are designed to act as a force multiplier on creatives' labor.

I saw a demo video involving anime about a year ago. The tool basically allowed a single artist to draw out their animation and then tell the model to go through frame-by-frame and clean up rough edges and stuff like that. Basically grunt work that low-paid artists in Korea might do for creators in Japan.

That's the vibe I'm getting here.

If Meta ever lied to a federal agent WRT being able to answer a subpoena or a search warrant, that's a felony.

So if there's merit to these claims, and a lot of cases went dead because Meta was lying its ass off to the government, a WHOLE LOT of people at Meta are looking at getting swept away in a sea of indictments if they choose to act.

The real threat here is that AI will get good enough that producers, directors and writers can work together to achieve their artistic vision without actors. That's very different from business people vibe coding a bunch of insecure spaghetti code garbage. In this case, I'm sympathetic, but not nearly as much as other industries because actors have always been just a cost of allowing creatives upstream of them in the industry to realize their vision.

If we go to war with China, we'll have to rely on companies like Anduril, not Raytheon, to supply our military.

Anduril and other startups focus on engineering systems and weapons that can be built with civilian factories, not highly specialized factories that can't scale.

BTW, that's how we won WWII. We didn't produce systems that were capability-at-any-cost. Engineers had to design systems that could be built at civilian factories because that's where the scalability has always been.

It doesn't matter whether it was $5, $40M or $40B. There was a serious contract in place between OpenAI leadership and Musk. The leadership broke it at the connivance of Microsoft.

We should all be hoping Musk prevails if for no other reason than SV billionaires like Altman and Nadella need to be aggressively beaten into submission by the court and their peers when they break contracts or break the law.

Even if you hate Musk, you should hope that Altman and Microsoft lose hard because that's precisely what would happen to any of us if we got into OpenAI or Microsoft's crosshairs for breach of contract and they decided it was worth pursuing.

It's a real operating system, not just a group of projects bolted together by a team of people from Google. Same with ChromeOS.

The best path forward for "desktop Linux," IMHO, is for KDE to formally enter the OS market via a rebranded Neon that is highly opinionated about ABI compatibility, Snap vs FlatPak/etc. and stuff like that. KDE is by far the DE most ready to go toe to toe with Windows both with users and developers because Qt is night and day more robust than its competition AFAICT.

When this bullshit crashes the economy. Unlike the 2008 market crash the upcoming grifter crash is going to have no floor because there's no actual assets behind it except your 401k.

This is a $100M technology pilot that is doing nothing more than trying out the idea of using public blockchains to replace the current crusty infrastructure for messaging financial transactions between institutions.

The housing and stock markets are in massive bubbles. I believe the median house price should be conservatively $100K cheaper than it currently is, and the stock market is firmly over 2x GDP which is an utterly insane multiple. Going into 2008, it was about 1.38x GDP. I think it's now 2.2x.

Add in this that we're going to instantly lose $2T of GDP the moment the federal government is finally forced to stop deficit spending.

Because this will destroy the former and humiliate the latter.

Once blockchains start getting used for real world infrastructure, software economics will kick in and annihilate the majority of L1 blockchains. They'll crash hard to $0.

On the flip side, all of the luddites who can't imagine how blockchain will work here will be shocked when nothing visible to the user changes and blockchain just becomes the tech underneath the covers... exactly as many of us have tried to warn you people.

The average user will never hold SOL, ETH, XRP, etc. because they won't need to. They won't have a crypto wallet with their stocks in it, unless they actually want that risk. It'll be just like a normal day logging into RobinHood or Fidelity to the end user, only the back end will be onchain and accessible to outside parties for auditing and things like that.

The biggest advantage is that if done right, it will force a fundamental shift in brokerage and clearinghouse accounting and accountability because it will be effectively impossible to get away with activity like naked shorting. It could also make short selling much riskier for brokerages (a good thing) because they won't be able to easily send an IOU as though it's a real share.

This is a pilot to move toward using NFT-like tokens to represent stocks in the digital trading system.

Your experience at say, Fidelity or RobinHood, will remain unchanged.

The underlying technology will use things like Ethereum and Solana to create a global ledger that is open to the public showing who is moving what around.

It will give the SEC radical transparency into stock trading activity to find bad actors.

Let me say this again: it has nothing to do with pumping ETH, SOL, etc. This is using those chains as a software platform, not digital asset speculation on the chain's tokens.